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Every time I hear things about the Aztecs, my brain rebels and thinks, "No, that has to be all made up stuff to highlight the savagery of the heathen lands or something."

Nope. What has been made up is the white-washed peace-and-love history of European civilizations. They were every bit as savage as Aztecs and other civilizations, they just covered it up to pretend they weren't and look down on other civilizations.

Yeah, no kidding. The Celts, for example, were prodigious headhunters. Sure, a lot of the stories the Romans told about them may have been exaggerated or outright falsehoods, but there's plenty of archaeological evidence indicating they did indeed engage in human sacrifice, along with other unpleasantness.

Although I'm not sure any other culture on Earth engaged in human sacrifice on the same scale as the Aztecs. They practically turned it into an industry.

That's a sobering thought for a Tuesday, and I wish it didn't ring true.

Tone change!

This is Horatio Nelson (left) and Bud (right). Together with Sewall K. Crocker they were the first cross-America road trip, in 1903.

Saw the Ken Burns documentary on the trip. Lack of a real highway system made traveling the western states the hardest part of the journey. They spent a good amount of time and money paying people with a team of horses to pull them out of mud/back on to the road.

Nelson spent about $8k to win a $50 bet that he could drive across the country.

+12

ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular

On November 12th, 1921 the negotiations for the Washington Naval Treaty began. It was the first international conference held in the US and the first Arms Control Treaty signed. It had massive sweeping impacts on naval ship design leading up to WWII. It prevented a new naval arms race and signaled a major shift in world power. We're not going to talk about any of those things today. Nope, we're gonna talk about why the Japanese ended up with the exact number of ships they had.

When you're a country coming to a negotiation like this, you have a couple of numbers in mind. You've got a never gonna happen number. You've got a we did great number. A we did alright number and most importantly the lowest number we'll accept. Japan got exactly the lowest number they would accept. There were a lot of arguments about who deserved what kind of tonnage to patrol their territories. The Japanese argued that they had the Pacific to cover along with other associated seas and thus deserved the same tonnage as the US and British. The US and British wanted to check the power of Tokyo. So in the end you get the 5:5:3:1.75:1.75 ratio. The US, British, Japanese, France and Italian navies would be allowed the tonnage in that order. The Japanese wanted the ratio to be 10:7 which would have given them 21 battleships instead of 18 compared to the US and UK getting 30.

IIRC, the numbers of ships were 15:15:9 (actually 22:18:10 to begin with, given the older and smaller ships in the UK and US navies until they were scrapped and replaced with slightly fewer 35,000 ton ships), rather than 30:30:18. Japan's economy would have collapsed under the strain of building 18 battleships and battlecruisers. TBH, even the 5:3 ratio was remarkably generous to Japan, the arms race that would have resulted had there been no treaty would have ended in Japan maybe building it's cherished Eight-Eight Fleet (that is, 8 battleships and 8 battlecruisers) by bankrupting itself, only to watch the US 30 or 40 capital ships without straining very hard.

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...). At the trial of the 11 naval officers who had stormed the PM's residence and shot PM Inukai, the court received a petition for leniency with 350,000 signatures signed in blood. 11 youths in Niigata pleaded to be executed in their stead, and to prove their sincerity, each of them cut off a finger and mailed it to the court. Which was kind of wasted, since the assassins got 5-15 year sentences. For gunning down the Prime Minister of their nation in his own home.

I goofed the ship count. But at the same time, the ambitions of the IJN and the reality of what they could produce were often at odds. The treaties make for handy scape goats for the League of Blood and the May 15th incidents but they really came more out of growing ultra-nationalism and radicalization of the IJN and IJA.

Every time I hear things about the Aztecs, my brain rebels and thinks, "No, that has to be all made up stuff to highlight the savagery of the heathen lands or something."

Nope. What has been made up is the white-washed peace-and-love history of European civilizations. They were every bit as savage as Aztecs and other civilizations, they just covered it up to pretend they weren't and look down on other civilizations.

Yeah, no kidding. The Celts, for example, were prodigious headhunters. Sure,a lot of the stories the Romans told about them may have been exaggerated or outright falsehoods, but there's plenty of archaeological evidence indicating they did indeed engage in human sacrifice, along with other unpleasantness.

Although I'm not sure any other culture on Earth engaged in human sacrifice on the same scale as the Aztecs. They practically turned it into an industry.

That depends if you only consider sacrifices for religious purposes as a separate class. If you expand the scope to include all forms of killings, then the Romans and Greeks turned human sacrifices into a lucrative and gruesome entertainment industry.

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

A strong Italian navy good enough to hold the Mediterranean from the British at Gibraltar and Seuz would have been a game changer. It would have freed up a ton of troops and supplies from trying to secure the fuel supplies in the ME and North Africa the Germans desperately needed, and securing that fuel early in the war means the Germans wouldn't have made those significant strategic mistakes they made trying to take the Caucus oil from the Soviets.

Both the Japanese and Italians were held back by the fact that they didn't really have the economies to build and sustain a truly world class navy like the US or Britain though.

Edit: Hmm, nevermind. I must be misremembering stuff since rereading the summary on wikipedia, it seems that they were just trying to hold Italy's Libyan colonies against the British, not really trying to secure oil supplies.

Jephery on February 2015

}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

Thats a hell of an understatement.

Just look at the numbers of carriers the us built without even really trying and then the Japanese are building what like 2 fleet carriers the entire war.

They believed in several kinds of souls in the afterlife, depending on how you died. Most went to Mictlan, the underworld. Mictlan was ruled by Mictlantecuhtli (which simply means "Lord of Mictlan"). He was depicted as a blood-spattered skeletal figure with a fleshless skull with the eyeballs intact. He had a necklace of human eyeballs.

There's a fair bunch of Aztec deities depicted as skeletal or wearing human bones - it was a symbol of fertility and health, and the circle of life into death into life again. He was sometimes depicted with his jaws wide open, ready to swallow the stars and hold them inside him during the day.

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

Eh, the intelligence helps but there is a really telling number that's kind of important and illustrates the production disadvantage. From 1941 to the end of the war, Japan built 17 carriers of various types. Mostly smaller support carriers akin to the escort carriers. Quite a few were conversions of various hulls, mostly sub tenders. During 1943, the US built 63 aircraft carriers. Again, most of those were lighter escort carriers that tended to carry a dozen planes either for ground support or convoy escorts. In terms of merchant ship production, Japan produced 4,152,361 tons of merchant shipping during the war. In 1943 the US produced 11,448,360 tons of merchant shipping. Now 1943 is an impressive year for US Naval production but it gives some idea of the scope of mismatch.

You can also look at things like submarine doctrine during the war. Or ASW doctrine. The impact of limited resources on things like pilot training. One of the little talked about things in WWII was the importance of the aircraft carriers we built in the great lakes. It allowed the US Navy provide their pilots much more flight time before being deployed then replacement pilots from other countries. Great intelligence is handy but it can be used against you. Halsey bit on the decoy carrier group at Leyte Gulf leading to the Battle off Samar which could have gone the other way and done devastating damage to the invasion of the Philippines.

Thomamelas on February 2015

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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular

A strong Italian navy good enough to hold the Mediterranean from the British at Gibraltar and Seuz would have been a game changer. It would have freed up a ton of troops and supplies from trying to secure the fuel supplies in the ME and North Africa the Germans desperately needed, and securing that fuel early in the war means the Germans wouldn't have made those significant strategic mistakes they made trying to take the Caucus oil from the Soviets.

Both the Japanese and Italians were held back by the fact that they didn't really have the economies to build and sustain a truly world class navy like the US or Britain though.

Edit: Hmm, nevermind. I must be misremembering stuff since rereading the summary on wikipedia, it seems that they were just trying to hold Italy's Libyan colonies against the British, not really trying to secure oil supplies.

It would have also made their trained manpower shortages much worse. And it doesn't solve the problem of the Italian Navy's high command realizing they literally could not replace any ship losses during the war and thus being super conservative with their use.

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

The Japanese actually argued for a higher ratio than they expected to get in order to gain other strategic advantages in compensation for compromising. They didn't have access to the raw materials required to build and maintain a larger ratio of warships, but in "acquiescing" to the lower ratio agreement they were able to secure recognition of Japan's "special interests" in Manchuria (thus securing and legitimizing their expansion into mainland Asia) and put a halt on expansion of Western military facilities in the Pacific - something that Japan took full advantage of in World War II.

That said, the treaty did force Japan to return control of the Shantung peninsula to China - a move which was interpreted as kindly as a slap to the face by most of the Japanese public and politicians, since it was essentially the Western powers saying to Japan "we know you've come a long way, but you're not truly our equal yet."

Every time I hear things about the Aztecs, my brain rebels and thinks, "No, that has to be all made up stuff to highlight the savagery of the heathen lands or something."

Nope. What has been made up is the white-washed peace-and-love history of European civilizations. They were every bit as savage as Aztecs and other civilizations, they just covered it up to pretend they weren't and look down on other civilizations.

Yeah, no kidding. The Celts, for example, were prodigious headhunters. Sure, a lot of the stories the Romans told about them may have been exaggerated or outright falsehoods, but there's plenty of archaeological evidence indicating they did indeed engage in human sacrifice, along with other unpleasantness.

Although I'm not sure any other culture on Earth engaged in human sacrifice on the same scale as the Aztecs. They practically turned it into an industry.

Not to mention how the comparitively modern Spanish Conquistadores engaged in behaviour that by their own account would have made Hannibal Lecter mulpf a bit. Those guys put the Einsatzgruppe to shame (and I use shame in the most amoral way possible.)

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

The basic mistake that the Japanese made was Pearl Harbor. If they'd played up the "grrr we're just fighting European colonialism" angle for even another 6-9 months and maybe built a few more subs meanwhile, they could have made things a fuck of a lot tougher in the Pacific.

Actually if they'd just gone with invading China and left the western interests alone, quite possibly no one would have really cared for a long time.

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

The basic mistake that the Japanese made was Pearl Harbor. If they'd played up the "grrr we're just fighting European colonialism" angle for even another 6-9 months and maybe built a few more subs meanwhile, they could have made things a fuck of a lot tougher in the Pacific.

Actually if they'd just gone with invading China and left the western interests alone, quite possibly no one would have really cared for a long time.

The biggest mistake of Pearl Harbor for the Japanese was that it definitively ended the fight between the aviators and the "gun club" that was crippling the Navy's ability to build doctrine (because both factions argued that they should be the center of it.) With the battleships out of commission, the Navy had no choice to build doctrine around the assets they had left - carriers and submarines - a shift that has continued to this day.

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

The basic mistake that the Japanese made was Pearl Harbor. If they'd played up the "grrr we're just fighting European colonialism" angle for even another 6-9 months and maybe built a few more subs meanwhile, they could have made things a fuck of a lot tougher in the Pacific.

Actually if they'd just gone with invading China and left the western interests alone, quite possibly no one would have really cared for a long time.

Japan was used to winning their wars very quickly with a singular decisive battle to decide it for them. Pearl Harbor was supposed to be that decisive strike, to hobble the United States' naval power and to scare them into avoiding war with Japan because of how costly it would be. They miscalculated America's resolve.

EDIT: Many ranking military officials in Japan knew that they would not be able to win in a drawn-out war against the United States. The idea was that they'd scare them into not bothering to seek war in the first place, and when that didn't work, the plan was to make every single battle so that America would say "Okay, this isn't worth it, let's seek to negotiate peace".

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

The basic mistake that the Japanese made was Pearl Harbor. If they'd played up the "grrr we're just fighting European colonialism" angle for even another 6-9 months and maybe built a few more subs meanwhile, they could have made things a fuck of a lot tougher in the Pacific.

Actually if they'd just gone with invading China and left the western interests alone, quite possibly no one would have really cared for a long time.

Japan was used to winning their wars very quickly with a singular decisive battle to decide it for them. Pearl Harbor was supposed to be that decisive strike, to hobble the United States' naval power and to scare them into avoiding war with Japan because of how costly it would be. They miscalculated America's resolve.

Oh yes, in many ways it was a cultural inevitability. I enjoy the luxury of armchair hindsight, just as I could also say that Britain could have ownsauced (or entirely obviated) the Pacific conflict by developing India, Singapore and Malayasia on the same basis as the "white" colonies (Now there's an 'Alternate History' scenario - what if the Victorian/Edwardian culture hadn't been horribly racist? But then they might well not have added those regions to the empire in the first place so v0v)

Every time I hear things about the Aztecs, my brain rebels and thinks, "No, that has to be all made up stuff to highlight the savagery of the heathen lands or something."

Nope. What has been made up is the white-washed peace-and-love history of European civilizations. They were every bit as savage as Aztecs and other civilizations, they just covered it up to pretend they weren't and look down on other civilizations.

Yeah, no kidding. The Celts, for example, were prodigious headhunters. Sure,a lot of the stories the Romans told about them may have been exaggerated or outright falsehoods, but there's plenty of archaeological evidence indicating they did indeed engage in human sacrifice, along with other unpleasantness.

Although I'm not sure any other culture on Earth engaged in human sacrifice on the same scale as the Aztecs. They practically turned it into an industry.

That depends if you only consider sacrifices for religious purposes as a separate class. If you expand the scope to include all forms of killings, then the Romans and Greeks turned human sacrifices into a lucrative and gruesome entertainment industry.

I remember an interesting argument about the scale of sacrificial killings among the Aztecs and other mesoamericans. Nearly all of those sacrificed were captured in war. In order to take that many live prisoners they deliberately engaged in tactics which, if your goal was only to defeat your enemy, would seem less than optimal. If you consider the sacrifices as an extension of the casualties in warfare, then it evens out with other cultures. IE: fewer deaths on the battlefied or due to infection after a battle and more deaths at the altar.

Every time I hear things about the Aztecs, my brain rebels and thinks, "No, that has to be all made up stuff to highlight the savagery of the heathen lands or something."

Nope. What has been made up is the white-washed peace-and-love history of European civilizations. They were every bit as savage as Aztecs and other civilizations, they just covered it up to pretend they weren't and look down on other civilizations.

Yeah, no kidding. The Celts, for example, were prodigious headhunters. Sure,a lot of the stories the Romans told about them may have been exaggerated or outright falsehoods, but there's plenty of archaeological evidence indicating they did indeed engage in human sacrifice, along with other unpleasantness.

Although I'm not sure any other culture on Earth engaged in human sacrifice on the same scale as the Aztecs. They practically turned it into an industry.

That depends if you only consider sacrifices for religious purposes as a separate class. If you expand the scope to include all forms of killings, then the Romans and Greeks turned human sacrifices into a lucrative and gruesome entertainment industry.

I remember an interesting argument about the scale of sacrificial killings among the Aztecs and other mesoamericans. Nearly all of those sacrificed were captured in war. In order to take that many live prisoners they deliberately engaged in tactics which, if your goal was only to defeat your enemy, would seem less than optimal. If you consider the sacrifices as an extension of the casualties in warfare, then it evens out with other cultures. IE: fewer deaths on the battlefied or due to infection after a battle and more deaths at the altar.

So they figured out a way to win a war with less casualties. That sounds like a great good!

It was so they could kill those people later on in a giant ceremony. That sounds not so good.

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

I don't think more resources for their navy would have made any difference either as they were spending it on obsolete hardware. If they had gone into the war with 8 Yamamoto's instead of just one it wouldn't have mattered much at all to the fighter planes that would have sunk them all.

But so unpopular was the treaty (and its successor, the London Naval Treaty, which also limited cruisers) with the ultranationalists, that they assassinated many of the politicians who had supported the treaty, including two Prime Minsters (and former PMs, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Finance Minister, the Grand Chamberlain...).

I wouldn't draw too straight of a line between the London Naval Treaty and the 2/26 Incident. It was listed as one of the perpetrators' many grievances against the government, but it wasn't a primary motivation (they were army officers, after all). You also give them too much credit; they failed to kill the prime minister and grand chamberlain.

I goofed on Admiral Suzuki, but the other PM I was referring to was Osachi Hamaguchi, who was shot a few weeks after the London Treaty was ratified, and died of his wounds a year later. On the one hand, his hard money policies in response to the Great Depression might have angered the ultranationalist who shot him, OTOH the jingoists also shot Takahashi Korekiyo, who was proto-Keynesian.

Yes, I was a little too glib, but the ultranationalists really did see the treaties as humiliating and another demonstration of how they were considered to be lesser. Of course, this ignores that France and Italy were limited to considerably smaller navies than Japan...

Boy did that ever bite both of those two countries in the ass.

Eh, the Italian Navy was terrible. It just would have had a chance to show off that terribleness even more. The French Navy ends up in tatters for various reasons but it wouldn't have prevented France from falling.

Indeed, a Navy is a pretty useless tool to have when your enemy is invading by land without going anywhere near the coast. A French navy would have had no significant role in WWII.

Frankly, I don't know that more ships would have helped the Japanese, either. One big US advantage was better intelligence, which allowed them to outmanoeuvre the Japanese navy. Another advantage was way more resources: the US could just keep fighting on and on while the Japanese were running out of food, ammo, and fuel. More ships on the Japanese side might have prolonged the war in the Pacific or made it bloodier, but with everything else stacked against Japan it would not have changed the war's final outcome.

The basic mistake that the Japanese made was Pearl Harbor. If they'd played up the "grrr we're just fighting European colonialism" angle for even another 6-9 months and maybe built a few more subs meanwhile, they could have made things a fuck of a lot tougher in the Pacific.

Actually if they'd just gone with invading China and left the western interests alone, quite possibly no one would have really cared for a long time.

The biggest mistake of Pearl Harbor for the Japanese was that it definitively ended the fight between the aviators and the "gun club" that was crippling the Navy's ability to build doctrine (because both factions argued that they should be the center of it.) With the battleships out of commission, the Navy had no choice to build doctrine around the assets they had left - carriers and submarines - a shift that has continued to this day.

This is one of those statements about history that had a kernel of truth at one point but it's lost it. So Pearl Harbor wasn't the end of the battleship. What happened at Pearl Harbor was pretty much a textbook use of a carrier force during the period. A rapid raiding strike to strike a target was pretty much what carrier doctrine was. The problem with carriers at that point was their inability to conduct night operations. The question of the time wasn't what was better, battleship or carrier but what the fuck do you do with carriers in a night action. Do you separate them from the main group and get them out of the way or do you keep them close to prevent a cruiser from getting close and killing the carriers but risk an opposing battleship getting lucky. It's not till 1943 when the Big E launched night fighters that the writing appears on the wall for the battleship. Because that indicated that night operations would be a thing and a major vulnerability of the carriers was no more. Combine that with the Doolittle Raid and you're beginning to talk about a major difference in force projection.

So how does Pearl Harbor factor in? Well King found himself with carriers and no battleships. So he switched up the task forces. Instead of a battleship core, they had a carrier core. So now the route to promotion goes through the carrier not the battleship. But that's a longer term effect. I'll also point out that there are a number of places where battleships showed that their bulk allowed them to carry a shit ton of AA guns and they could give as good as they got to aircraft attacking them. But the final nail in the coffin is the atomic bomb. Carriers can launch them. Battleships can't. Well not until some advancements in miniaturization happen a bit later. Carriers are now in a completely different league of force projection.

An interesting article about Edwardian-era suffragettes and the use of political violence.

A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.

One of the really cool things about these documentaries is how they'll often do the same tasks, but with different materials in different times.

Like I'm going through Tales from the Green Valley right now, and it's amazing seeing the difference from Secrets of the Castle. Steel tools go from being a precious commodity to something they just keep lying around on a farm. It's easy to read about how these kinds of things changed on a macro scale over the centuries, but it's so cool to really see in embodied in just how people get on with their day.

A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.

Every time I hear things about the Aztecs, my brain rebels and thinks, "No, that has to be all made up stuff to highlight the savagery of the heathen lands or something."

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to the Americas if the Aztecs hadn't been such giant dickbags. Still ravaged by smallpox, obviously, but maybe Cortés wouldn't have been able to ally with the subjugated tribes of the Empire and overthrow Tenochtitlan.

And sometimes I also wonder what would have happened to the Americas if the Spanish hadn't been such giant dickbags.

That's a depressing thought. But I have to admit... with my limited knowledge of history, the only Imperial Overlords I might consider putting into the "Not Giant Dickbags" column are the Mongols. Now, sure, if they wanted to conquer you, you were in deep shit, but once you'd been conquered the Mongols were fairly OK rulers for the time. The whole "you can walk from one end of the Mongol Empire to the other with a gold plate on your head and not fear being robbed" kind of thing. Also their religious tolerance. Although I'm sure someone who knows more than I is going to tell me that, no, actually the Mongols really were giant dickbags to the people they ruled.

And now I wonder how many other Empires in history, if any, weren't completely terrible to the people they'd conquered/subjugated.

The 'not getting robbed' thing only lasted for a couple decades, and I'd hardly say improved crime rates justified the insane body counts they racked up, not to mention they probably deserve a large part of the blame for the Middle East being as fucked up as it is today. They took established civilizations and left rubble and corpses.

Edit: It's also worth pointing out that crime rates were low because the punishments were extreme. Your options were 'death', 'death', and 'super-death'.

I liked Dan Carlin's take on the modern historical trend of focusing on the couple of good things the Mongols did and ignoring the tens of millions of people they killed (and that a lot of the good things that happened were side effects the Mongols weren't really trying for). In a thousand years from now, will historians be trying to rehabilitate the Nazis, with "at least they made the trains run on time" being the new "at least you could walk across the steppe with gold on your head"?

I liked Dan Carlin's take on the modern historical trend of focusing on the couple of good things the Mongols did and ignoring the tens of millions of people they killed (and that a lot of the good things that happened were side effects the Mongols weren't really trying for). In a thousand years from now, will historians be trying to rehabilitate the Nazis, with "at least they made the trains run on time" being the new "at least you could walk across the steppe with gold on your head"?

I liked Dan Carlin's take on the modern historical trend of focusing on the couple of good things the Mongols did and ignoring the tens of millions of people they killed (and that a lot of the good things that happened were side effects the Mongols weren't really trying for). In a thousand years from now, will historians be trying to rehabilitate the Nazis, with "at least they made the trains run on time" being the new "at least you could walk across the steppe with gold on your head"?

rocketry is about the only good thing the Nazi's did

No?

The nazi war machine was incredibly efficient. They made excellent armaments, they built excellent machines, they were extraordinarily efficient at suppressing discontent, and managed to almost wipe out the Jewish peoples in a few years.

I wouldn't consider being an effective monster to be particularly laudable.

Not when you're staring him in his highly-efficient monster face and feeling his highly-efficient monster breath on your neck, no. But in, say, 800 years from now, when the threat of Nazi tanks rolling through France is as laughable to people as the threat of Mongol bowmen riding through Asia is to us, and all that's remembered about Nazi are a handful of talking points like "they were highly efficient" in the same way as all most people remember of the Mongols were "they pacified Central Asia", will people's attitude be different?